


You'll forever be our hero

by mochi_outlier



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, life after death, steve meets younger version of himself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 18:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16203158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mochi_outlier/pseuds/mochi_outlier
Summary: “So am I actually hallucinating in the throes of death? Quite pathetic for a hero."What would your younger self say if they were to meet you now? Would they be proud or disappointed? Steve has always been scared to know.





	You'll forever be our hero

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to Anna, my lovely fellow Steve lover, and to my 12 years old self. I hope you're proud of me, too, girl ♥
> 
> Inspired by this fanart https://twitter.com/toy084/status/1048158916700323840 by @toy084 on Twitter.

_He fell down and then there was silence._

When Steve opened his eyes he was surrounded by white. The colour was all around him, walls melting into floors seamlessly. It was weird, and even more confusing was the fact that his eyes weren’t hurting because of the bright light. Indeed, nothing was hurting him; for the first time in a while he felt serene, relaxed, pacified. He felt himself wake up fully and looked around, trying to understand where he was. A voice in his head was suggesting what this looked like, but he ignored it and started getting up. He stopped breathing as soon as he saw who was expecting him.

“Hi,” the boy said, his voice deeper than he remembered. Steve stifled a laugh, surprised by how that gravelly, imposing voice fitted that small, frail body. He was starting to understand why most people had found him ridiculous, at the time.

“Hi,” he answered, “what are you doing here?”

The boy smiled. “It isn’t becoming of you to play the fool. Don’t you already know?”

Steve supposed he had been asking for it. A person shouldn’t try to deceive themselves, after all. He looked at his own face, so gaunt before the serum, and wondered if his eyes still sparkled with that hope. He was afraid not.

“So am I actually hallucinating in the throes of death? Quite pathetic for a hero.”

The boy (also Steve, he supposed; maybe Stevie, if Bucky had his way) shook his head. “You’re not hallucinating. I would say this is your pre-introduction to the afterlife. You’re still not really dead but not really alive either, so we have to wait before we’re officially allowed to enter. Stupid rules, I know, but Captain America has to follow the rules.”

This time he had to laugh, and the boy did too. Steve had never been for following rules he didn’t believe in. One of his greatest flaws, possibly.

“That still doesn’t explain your presence here. You are me, and yet you’re in front of me.”

There was a pause, a frown on younger Steve’s face which told him he was actually thinking about that. “It’s complicated. We are technically inside your mind, so I don’t exactly exist. I’d say I’m a fragment of your own personality which you idolized as being “the real you” that you don’t feel you identify with anymore though. In a way, I’m the you who died when you took the serum.”

It made sense. Steve had never really talked with anyone about this, but a part of him had always felt defeated that he had needed to take the serum to become useful. He wasn’t ungrateful, he loved being healthy and strong and it was a privilege forgetting how it was not being able to breathe freely, but inside he had always hoped he’d be enough as he was. Sometimes he still thought he was but a science experiment, that everything special about him really came from a bottle. In a way, he really believed he had killed his own past, himself, because he had been “too weak”. It wasn’t a nice feeling. Also, Steve had always felt most true to himself when he referred to himself as the little guy, even when he wasn’t so little anymore. Yet for a while that too sounded like a fraud, when he pretty well knew he had sometimes abused of his strength for his own personal purposes (he wasn’t proud of how he acted regarding Bucky during the so-called superheroes’ “civil war”, and he knew his reasoning then hadn’t only been consisting of justice). There was truth to little Steve’s words, even though he did not like it.

“But why are you _here_?”

The boy smiled. “Because you deserve to know the truth, and you deserve to hear it from me.” He took a deep breath and started talking again. “I am proud of you, of what you’ve become. What we have become. I know you like to think you had nothing to prove, and you know I know you’re full of shit. You proved yourself. You didn’t need the serum, yet you went through the pain it took because you wanted to do more, to be more. You sacrificed everything and you didn’t deserve that but you filled me with pride. I know most of the time you are afraid of disappointing everyone, of disappointing me, but you never did. Even when you made mistakes. As long as you tried to be better you could never disappoint me.”

Steve hadn’t noticed, but his eyes had filled with tears. There were times late at night, while he was alone and away from everyone else, he wondered if he still was the good man Dr. Erskine had seen, or if he had become one of the bullies he had always hated. If he had betrayed in some way the ideals he used to stand for. “ _God’s righteous man, pretending he can live without a war_.”

He still felt chills thinking about Peggy’s victorious face and his own paralysing fear of the unknown, of having no purpose. He had been terrified then, because he should have been happy at the perspective of victory and he could only feel despair. Who was he if he weren’t fighting?

The boy started crying, too. “I’m sorry you didn’t get the chance to live your life outside of this. You deserved better, we deserved more. Maybe we were never meant to survive to the end. You did what you had to, though. I’m proud of you.” Then he jumped and hugged Steve tightly, and after a few seconds he responded in kind, closing his eyes.

“You did so well.”

He guessed it didn’t matter, anyway. This time there was no happy ending, no 70 years jump through time. This time it was for real. He should be scared, but he could only feel an overwhelming sense of peace. He knew he had done the right thing and he could rest, at last.

“You’ll forever be our hero.”

He reopened his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> This is shamelessly self-indulgent and also one of my favorite tropes. This is also me projecting my own fears and feelings of failure concerning my younger self's hopes and dreams, so if you feel it doesn't fit Steve's character at all you may be right but I relate to him a lot and use him going through the same shit i do as a coping mechanism. Sue me.  
> That said, I hope some people enjoyed this and that it didn't feel too sad. Remember: you're still here, you're alive and doing your best and you're making your younger self proud ♥


End file.
